So is the name ‘blog’ history, too?

We’re offering a simple site design / building consultancy and we have used the term ‘blog’ in describing the service. I’m wondering whether I shouldn’t lose the ‘blog’ term altogether. Who does the distinction matter to, anyway?

Up until recently, I saw blogs as ‘adjuncts’ to websites. You know, that quick-and-easy, more personal space where your clients / prospects could learn more about you through views, tastes and lifestyle. Now, I think that distinction is losing its value and today’s ‘20-somethings’, comfortable building online identities via a raft of different social media (Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and MSN) probably see the ‘formal’ website as the adjunct to their real live selves.

If it is the case, it’s certainly an interesting turnaround. The more corporate ‘websites’ I see, the more stuck they appear in a faceless, turn of the century motif: slick, shiny and relatively inhuman.

I think we’re a turning point where what once seemed reassuringly authoritarian - the typical GloboCorp web presence stuffed with corporate jargon - now looks frozen, stiff and creaking and uninvitingly inhuman.

I also think that WordPress, like Google, will emerge from a small pool of competitors to become synonymous with the moment ‘web design’ left the hands of the html technicians struggling to replicate printed matter on the web and was put into the hands of people like you and me.

In 10 years time I suspect few of us will remember what ‘html’ stood for since all new technologies and their protocols must eventually become ubiquitous and invisible. Even now, words like ‘blog’ and ‘podcast’ feel like millstones weighing down something that’s essentially fleeting, something that’s already moved on.

December 16, 2007 | Filed Under blogging technique, business insight 

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